Amid COVID-19, there will be winners and losers among Canada’s small businesses
TORONTO – Steve Ballantyne and Mitchell Stern have big things planned for 2020. Or rather had big things planned. Right now they don’t know if that should be strictly past-tense.
Ballantyne and Stern are the co-owners of Station Cold Brew, an ethically sourced, nitro-infused cold brew coffee company based in Toronto, which over the past five years has established itself as one of the premier boutique coffee companies in the country. But over the course of the last week, as the coronavirus pandemic has profoundly compromised business operations across practically every industry, everything suddenly seems precarious — even for guys who make and sell coffee.
“We’ve been preparing for 2020 to be a year of hypergrowth, planning innovation, putting pieces in place to grow our business drastically,” says Stern. “Now we need to shift to survival mode.”
In the face of a global pandemic, and in an effort to mitigate the spread of the disease throughout Canada, most non-essential businesses in the country have been obliged to close temporarily, leaving many bars, restaurants, gyms, shops, and other storefronts shuttered to reduce public congregation and promote social distancing. The effect of these closures on service workers and people in other vulnerable fields has been grim, as the source of income for hundreds of thousands of Canadian vanishes overnight.
Less obvious are the consequences for other kinds of small businesses — some drastic and immediate, some unforeseeable and long-term. COVID-19 is already inciting radical change for everyone, and companies such as Station Cold Brew simply do not know what it will ultimately mean.
Ballantyne explains that there are “basically three types of companies” in the time of pandemic. There are the winners, such as say, Netflix, whose business will boom as a result of self-isolation. There are losers, such as the restaurants forced to close, and where margins are too slim to survive more than a week or two without revenue. And there are fields that aren’t really impacted by this at all, such as auto insurance.
“We’re in the category that doesn’t know yet what this means for us,” Ballantyne says. In recent days, he’s seen fellow business owners hit on sudden, unexpected windfalls, such as the people who make Flow boxed water, whose sales are apparently, “up like crazy, doing gangbusters.”